Wednesday, 3 May 2006

Hear it from the BOSS: The Leadership Question (Melbourne)

What makes a leader? How is Australians' view of leadership changing?
This is an edited extract from the HEAR IT FROM THE BOSS panel discussion on leadership held in Melbourne on May 3, 2006 Geraldine Doogue moderated a panel of:

• Amanda Sinclair, professor of management at the Melbourne Business School
• Warwick Negus, CEO, Colonial Fist State, Global Asset Management
• Don Argus, Chairman, BHP Billiton & Brambles
• Alison Watkins. CEO, Mrs Crocket's Kitchen
• Alan Joyce, CEO, Jetstar

Sponsored by:

Transcript

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Ladies and gentlemen, could you welcome Don Argus, Alison Watkins, Warwick Negus, Amanda Sinclair and Alan Joyce, our panellists tonight. We are going to talk about leadership. Napoleon said a leader was a broker in hope. Plato believed the desire to power virtually disqualified someone from having access to it. I think that's quite a challenging thought. The late John Kenneth Galbraith said: "You can't be too far ahead of the march of progress. Wait until you hear the music coming up the corridor and open up the door just before it arrives."

What does a modern leader represent in Australian life? Our guests will speak among themselves and then I'll open the floor to you and we'll have a bit of a chat.

Don Argus is a businessman of a great many years' standing. He now is Chairman of BHP Billiton and of Brambles Industries, and is a board member of the Australian Foundation Investment Company. He's been Managing Director and CEO of the National Australia Bank and Chairman of the Australian Bankers Association; he was a director of the Commonwealth Games here; he has been awarded various honorary degrees; and he was made an officer of the Order of Australia in 1998 in recognition of his services to the banking and finance industries. Don, do you think a leader is born or made?

DON ARGUS: I think a leader can be identified very early in their life, and I think mainly through their intellect and the skill that they display. But I don't believe the principles of good leadership emerge until they're really put to the test, and I've found that a lot of leaders don't really accept that they are a leader until they are put into the heat of the battle, and then I think you start to see the principles emerge. I think that to be a leader you have to have intellect, and you'll choose your skill. But I think it's the principles approach to leadership that start to emerge. So I'd say you're not born with it.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Can you pick a leader in a young person? Do you think you've got better at that?

DON ARGUS: Yes, I think so. But, again, until you see them in various circumstances, you really don't know at that point of their development whether they're going to be a long-term leader, When they accept that when they know it all there's more to learn – that's the first sign that maybe there's a little bit more wisdom to come.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Alison Watkins is currently chair of Mrs Crocket's Kitchen Pty Limited, a leading Australian supplier of fresh-chilled prepared foods. She has an annual turnover in excess of $100 million. She came via Berri Limited, and prior to that had several senior roles at the ANZ Banking Group and at McKinseys. Alison, how do you see this? Do you think leaders are born or made?

ALISON WATKINS: I like to assume that leaders are made, actually, because I think that there's nothing more soul destroying than to categorise somebody, either explicitly or implicitly, as not a leader. So you're a leader. You've got leadership potential. I'm going to invest in you, and I'm sorry I've put you in some box that says, "Can't be developed as a leader." I would much rather say, "Look, I'm going to assume that everybody can be a leader, and those who have the will to lead, I'm going to invest in developing your skills, and maybe some of you will surprise me, and that's fantastic, and some of you, it may not end up working out. But I think you'll probably do whatever it is you are doing a whole lot better for having had that sort of development. So why wouldn't you assume that leaders are developed, not born?

GERALDINE DOOGUE: So you think everyone is capable? You like to work on that principle?

ALISON WATKINS: I like to work on that assumption, and why not? What's the downside?

GERALDINE DOOGUE: And do you think you have got better at identifying a potential in a young person who's just starting out?

ALISON WATKINS: Yeah, I do. I like to see people who have the will, because I do believe you can develop the skills. So people who like to take the lead, whether it's a lead around a particular issue, or taking charge of a situation or a crisis – there are a whole lot of ways you can display that will, and then you can work on the skill side. The other ingredient that's important also is self-awareness. Everyone needs to recognise that there's a skill set to develop as a leader, and you've got to be willing to have a good, hard look at yourself and understand where you need to develop.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: And if you feel that people are too brittle or insecure to do that, it almost by definition rules them out?

ALISON WATKINS: Yeah, it does. There are different ways to tackle it, and if you really think that somebody has great capability you've got to use a lot of judgement about how that message will be received and how you can deliver that message to best effect. It's up to me as a leader, I think, to try and realise that potential, and I need to be quite thoughtful about how I tackle it with different people.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: I think that business of whether people get psychoanalysed on the job is very tricky, very interesting, indeed. Warwick Negus is Chief Executive Officer of Colonial First State Global Asset Management. He was recruited by BHP in 1981 as a graduate trainee in their Sydney offices. He moved to BT Australia Limited, and developed BT's approach to investing in Asian markets. In1993 he was recruited by Goldman Sachs with a mandate to do precisely that. He co-founded, in 2002, 452 Capital Pty Limited. He is Chairman of the Board of Advisers of the Faculty of Commerce and Economics at UNSW; he's on the investment committee for the Salvation Army; and he's a director of Century Australia Investments Limited, which is listed on the ASX. Warwick, what do you think a leader is? Do you think they're born or made?

WARWICK NEGUS: I think when you look at a team of people it's easy to say that person would be the natural leader of this team because of A, B or C. But I think that overlooks the reason the things that that person may have done in order to get to that position, and I think in an organisation it's easier to identify a pool of talent, a pool of people who have enormous potential throughout their career. It's easier as you become more experienced to identify that in people earlier, but I think you have to create an environment for that pool and for a large pool of talent to become leaders in time. I think it emerges, as Don says. It becomes more obvious later in life when people are put in situations where leadership is required. It becomes obvious as their careers unfold.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: But are you sometimes surprised by who does suddenly show potential?

WARWICK NEGUS: Yeah, sometimes. I guess in my career we've spent a lot of time recruiting and thinking about what the right type of people are – the right type of person to be successful in a career. At Goldman, I was Chairman of Recruiting, among other things, and in those years it was more trench warfare. It was the war for talent to identify the smartest kids, and you'd look for things in them, the activities, the things that they've done away from school – how much they can fit into their lives and how eloquently they could deliver their abilities to you. I think the more time you spend at that end in bringing people into your organisation, I think the more likely it is that those sorts of people will emerge as leaders in time.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Let's say you had someone who was incredibly idealistic and they'd gone off and done Third World work, because this is a very typical skill-set that I know that people get chosen from. So you can't imagine them actually fitting easily into a corporate straitjacket. You still think it's worth that risk, to draw that type of character in?

WARWICK NEGUS: I think the worst thing in an organisation is everyone with exactly the same background, exactly the same characteristics. My career has mostly been in investment management, and I've hired medical doctors and psychiatrists – that one didn't work out – engineers, architects, people from different walks of life, and blended them in. Those sorts of people bring an interesting mix to an organisation that's largely financial.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Amanda Sinclair was appointed Foundation Professor of Management, Diversity and Change at the Melbourne Business School in 1995. She came via work in government and consulting in areas of social policy and organisational development. The title of her doctoral research was "The Tyranny of the Team" and it analysed how management teams also can function as devices for control and coercion. She teaches leadership and ethics and change and gender diversity at the business school, and she also teaches yoga at the business school. She has a new book coming out exploring how leadership might foster liberation. Is this about the business of analysing whether leaders are born or made?

AMANDA SINCLAIR: Certainly I think it's part of it. I think that we've paid too little attention to the formative influences that shape leaders, and it doesn't take much study of business leaders, political leaders, leaders in the community to realise that often in their past there have been very powerful shaping influences. As students of leaders, people interested in leadership, we really do need to put that bit back in. The pendulum swung too far in terms of arguing that leaders are all about development, it's all about being made. I think it's a question of how people work with, build on their experiences, how they respond to some of those background influences. Part of freeing leadership to be better is about helping people understand their own histories and then moving forward with those histories in a very reflective and thoughtful way.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: You say it's setbacks in childhood that often is a common factor and a pattern when you look at leaders, and how people have chosen to respond to those setbacks?

AMANDA SINCLAIR: Indeed I do. I was at a function the other night for the retirement of a very senior Professor in the university, Professor Pat Grimshaw, and, yes, she's a very esteemed person, she's been an absolute forward thinker in the field of women in the university and as a historian also, and she let slip towards the end of her speech that she was the 10th child in a wharfie's family. That is crucial to understanding the way she's gone about the job that she has and the way she's become a professor and a leader.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Are you saying that there's been an element of grit in the child to overcome those setbacks so that their sense of self has been shaken but it's been a spur to best their opponent.

AMANDA SINCLAIR: I think there are a lot of things that might play into that. As the 10th child you wouldn't have delusions any delusions about your importance. You would certainly understand that you had to work quite hard in order to make your mark, in order to get attention. I think that there would be a sort of a natural humility, but also perhaps a commitment to justice. We've often found in our research that if you're a first-born in the family, you've got a natural vested interest in autocracy, whereas if you're a later-born you' have a natural interest in democracy and looking at how to get power from the bottom.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Alan Joyce – you can just pick up there, I'm sure. Alan is Chief Executive Officer of Jetstar, appointed in October 2003. He has 18 years' experience in the airline industry in a number of management positions. He worked at Ansett in a variety of roles, and spent nine years at Aer Lingus working in a variety of roles but particularly playing a key role in devising Aer Lingus's low-cost strategy and completely repositioning the business model for the new era. He has a Master of Science degree from Trinity College, Dublin. Alan, what are your thoughts about leadership – made or born?

ALAN JOYCE: I think leadership is definitely something that's not inborn. Leaders can come from people who have experienced different challenges, and that comes out very clearly in how they perform. I think the most important thing I heard from people around the panel is that the experiences of when things don't go right is probably what makes the foundation of a very good leader, and how they cope with those challenges and build on them. People who haven't gone through some of those bad experiences sometimes don't know how to cope and sometimes can't judge how to lead an organisation.

A lot of diverse challenges exist at Jetstar. So we're after people in terms of the management who are experts at the area in which they're managing but at the same time can think of new ways to do things and to reduce the complexity within the business. So for us the biggest challenges are always being creative, thinking of new ideas, communicating them effectively. It's an organisation that's having to manage massive growth. We have, taken a very diverse management team in from a number of different industries and from the aviation industry.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: You have a specific hiring policy, haven't you, in terms of the age group you hire?

ALAN JOYCE: Our policy generally is that we don't select people from particular age groups but from a diversity of age groups and backgrounds.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: And what about part-time and flexible work? How does that build this phenomenal growth that you're talking about with all the volatility that's involved? Do you like a lot of flexibility within your workplace in terms of styles, or not?

ALAN JOYCE: We try. Some of the industrial relations instruments that we work under can be very regimented and do limit the number of part-time employees we can use, and we've been trying to change that. But the workplace that we try and encourage people to is very much that, to have people participating from all sorts of backgrounds, part time, full time, casual.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: But that means you have to have a very tight focus. Your people management has to be good because you've got all this variety.

ALAN JOYCE: And I think it's also that your recruitment has to be very good because you have a core culture that you're happy with. At the same time you're growing so fast that you don't want the new people you're bringing in to change that culture and convert it into something that's completely different.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: I want to look at diversity, because I think often there's a lot of people talk about this and they don't mean it, and I also want to look at work/life balance. Don, you're pretty candid about the fact that you think you got the work/life balance – you're not necessarily proud of how you did that in terms of the family/work fit over your career.

DON ARGUS: I suppose it was a product of the era that we were in. In the banking days when I started, you went where you were told. You actually had to get permission to get married. In my first few years in the bank I played a lot of sport, and the bank was a place to get my feed once a week. But they found a way to curtail my activities and sent me to a place called Dimbulah, west of Mareeba, and it would be the furthermost point the bank could send anyone. In that regulated environment there wasn't much flexibility. You did as you were told, and that was it. In lots of instances the family suffered as you went forward because you then progress on with your career, and the demands become greater and greater, and we're in a regulated environment still. It was always the family that had to compromise for the work environment. That, of course, has now changed quite dramatically. But I'd have to say to you – and I'll probably be a bit controversial – if you think you're going to run a major corporation, a world corporation with an international footprint and you don't think your family is going to suffer, then don't take it on, because there is a compromise. To do that sort of a job you really do need to have a partnership, and your partnership is your family unit.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Are you sure that's true – there's no model that doesn't allow for some better fit? Because that just screens out lots of good people, doesn't it?

DON ARGUS: But it doesn't screen them out. The people make the choice.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Yeah. But we lose we lose their talent, don't we?

DON ARGUS: I agree with that, but that's just the way – the demands of the stakeholders and your family is a stakeholder in this – seems to override the family unit. For instance, if you are engaging with 50,000 people, you've got a 50,000 workforce, and they're at various points around the globe, that you're on call virtually 24 hours, that must intrude on family lifestyle.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: But why can't you in put a quarantine around Sunday, for the sake of argument? I can't see why that doesn't work.

DON ARGUS: I used to put a quarantine around Saturday and Sunday, but I can tell you it never worked.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Now, Warwick, you've got some extraordinary stories from your past life.

WARWICK NEGUS: Yeah, – I mean, I agree completely with what Don said about work/life balance. When I was trying to establish my career it was the family that suffered. We moved constantly around the world when I was at Goldman. We lived in Hong Kong. We had a baby there. We moved to Singapore. We had another child there. We moved to London. We had another child there. And we moved to Sydney and we had another one in Sydney. So the family size was increasing with my seniority, and the balance, the family always suffered. When I lived in Singapore, there was one year where I was away from home for 200 days. At Goldman, I was there for 10 years, and, you know, I did constantly weekends, 3.00 a.m. conference calls, et cetera. I tell a story of a managing director get-together every year where we talked about work/life balance, and the chairman would always tell this anecdote: "You've been working long hours and your family hasn't seen you for a week because you've been travelling. It's your five year old's birthday. It's very important to your wife and to your family that you get there, and you're in the taxi on the way home and you've got the present in your hand and the chairman calls you up and says, "Look, we've got a very important deal. We need you to turn the taxi round and go to the airport." And the chairman would say, "Well, what's the right answer?" And, of course, everyone would say, because it was a conference, "Oh, we'd continue on and go home to the birthday party," with everyone thinking, "No, we'd go to the airport." And in fact the chairman probably would have gone to the airport as well. I think that it was really a cultural thing; it was so results oriented that to get the results it was a real time commitment.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: What was the tipping point of change for you, then?

WARWICK NEGUS: I had done it for a long time, and I did want to make a life change. So I stepped out of that to establish a boutique fund management business, and for the period I was doing that it was a fabulous lifestyle. We did what we wanted when we wanted it. The only problem was we grew so quickly we wanted to stop the growth. And the problem was that by Tuesday morning I was out of things to do for the rest of the week, and I was becoming somewhat complacent. So I ended up taking the role that I have now. But I think at this stage of my career I do have much more control over the balance. It doesn't stop the Sunday calls. Unfortunately people have my phone number, and if there's something that's really important that's going to happen on Monday morning, the best time to do it is Sunday.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Do you try take readings from your kids? Are there points where you get a sense it's gone too far and you're capable of reading the signs that your family is paying too much of a price?

WARWICK NEGUS: Yes. What I've tried to do with my week is carve out times that – they're not sacred times, but I drop the kids at school twice a week. It means I don't get to the office until a quarter past nine, but it's really important to the kids to go with me to school.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: And do you allow that for the people who are working to you?

WARWICK NEGUS: Sure. I'm not so worried about the hours people spend at the office. If you don't need specifically to be there at 9, it doesn't matter if you're there at 9.30. We don't watch the time clock.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Alison, McKinseys did you make decisions along the way to have a better fit, or is that not what drove you?

ALISON WATKINS: Yeah. I think you do go through different stages and it's a different journey for everyone, and I can certainly empathise with what Don and Warwick are saying. But it's really important that as leaders of businesses we are challenging and changing that, because the economic reality is that we have an ageing population, a declining birth rate, we're educating a lot of women –more than 50 per cent of our graduates out of law schools are women – so there's tremendous investment by the community in that, and at the moment we haven't yet adapted our organisational models enough to really make the most of that investment and adapt to our changing social profile. I think it's up to leaders like us to be catalysts in making that change happen, because the organisations that aren't are restricting themselves in terms of the talent pool they can attract. There are a lot of people who still want to work at Goldman Sachs, but there are probably a lot of people who are just saying, "It's not for me", and they're probably good people and they probably could have done a pretty good job and made a contribution to changing that organisation. We worked hard at McKinsey, although McKinsey always was very conscious of trying to create some balance, and I had three children while I was there, and I found McKinsey very receptive to me. If I was proactive they really responded.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: I sense that you pitched yourself – you knew there was a lot asked of you, and you'd chosen that, but that you had marker buoys you put in your life to remind yourself who you were to stay sane. Do you see it like that?

ALISON WATKINS: Yeah. I've got kids and I've a very assertive husband – they're all pretty good at keeping me grounded. I really do enjoy working in organisations such as Berri, where you're dealing with growers and rural sorts of grassroots people. I have a particular sort of rural affinity, I suppose; I grew up on a farm. That's an important part of me. There's a lot of luck and timing that comes into what happens in your career, and if things, don't go your way then you don't come down so hard and you've got your family there to really keep you centred. That's very important.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Amanda, you might talk to us about some of these deeper elements of leadership that interest you.

AMANDA SINCLAIR: I wonder how much leadership we're showing if we are actually consumed by our jobs. If our entire identity is anchored in our career and our job, I wonder how much leadership we're showing really. We've had a couple of examples of great leadership in terms of saying, "Well, we're not completely defined by our jobs and we do have a surf and a set of interests outside of that.” I think maybe it's our job to think about, explore, innovate, in terms of ways of making it more possible for people to live a life as well as do a leadership job.

I want to also share a couple of ideas tonight with you. One is about the idealisation of leadership, and the other is about the identity work that I believe is very valuable for leaders.

I want to suggest, first, that we have a tendency to idealise leaders and leadership. We idealise leaders as having the answer, and I'm suggest there's more than a few of us, maybe even myself included, who've come along tonight thinking that maybe we'll get some answers, secretly hoping for some answers. So let me be frank: I'm here to disappoint you. Further, I think that it's our job to disappoint you. I think it's this panel's job not to do what lots of books on leadership do – that is, assume that leadership is a marvellous and great thing instead of telling us how to do more on it.

While our appetite for leadership is understandable, I think it's also potentially quite dangerous, and there are plenty of recent examples in both the political arena and business where we've been absolutely seduced by leadership promising solutions and minor miracles.

Unfortunately, there's also a process of dumb seduction that sometimes goes on around leadership. Where followers get seduced, they look to leaders to provide the direction, and then the leaders are seduced by their own powers of seduction. The Enron leadership team comes to mind, or perhaps closer to home, One.Tel. I think we need to look deeper into our hunger for leaders and leadership. Instead of waiting for leaders to appear or develop, we need to look at how the whole idea of leadership is produced in societies, how it comes to have status and truth as a governing idea. We are characterised by just a tinge, and in some cases more than a tinge, of pathology.

Now, we may ignore this pathology at our peril. The best leaders are those who know this about themselves, who are in touch with their hunger, whether it be for approval, for attention, for control, for love, and they make active efforts to manage it. This is what is referred to in some of the literature as owning your own shadow. And there are many different ways to develop this kind of self-awareness, to do this identity work, that I'm advocating here. One of them is to look at our backgrounds, to spend time understanding that. The point here is not that in order to be a leader you need to be an elder son, or tall, or to have had certain sorts of difficult experiences. The point is that all backgrounds shape our appetites and vulnerabilities in leadership, and I think it is by bringing these connections into more conscious awareness that we're actually able to detach ourselves a little from their hold and begin to be better leaders, and to experiment with different ways of leading.

My childhood certainly fuelled my fixation with leadership. I was a third child after two boys, two very demanding, space-taking-up brothers, always named collectively: "the boys". I was often ignored or dismissed as the conscientious one who got there by hard work. In my career, part of me has been propelled by my desire to join, to be one of the boys and to prove the designation about conscientiousness quite wrong. My older brother became an engineer, but he built lots of cubbies. In fact, he didn't build cubbies, he built forts. They were multi-storey edifices with battlements and dungeons, and I wanted to be on the battlement and not in the dungeon, as I sometimes found myself to be. I'm still acting this one out, but hopefully not quite as slavishly driven by this motivation as perhaps I once was. Another example comes from my MBA students.

A very common pattern among the young men I teach is that there has been strong pressure in their history, in their career to date, to take charge, to not show emotion, to work like a Trojan, to appear perpetually confident and in control. They've internalised the idea that this is what leadership is all about. Now, such a template remains unconscious and very enslaving, not only for them but for the people who are surrounding them in workplaces, until they do the work of identifying and understanding where this has come from and why it has such a strong hold. It's not until they've done this work that they start to see that they have a choice, that they might actually deliver better leadership, for example, by listening or sharing their doubts.

So I'm proposing a form of identity work, but it's different from a number of the remedies that have gained currency in recent years centring around authenticity and spirituality and values and so on. I see a lot of problems with this. Some of these remedies exhort the leader to be true to themselves. They elevate self awareness as an end in itself, and I don't think it should be that; second, they can encourage a kind of self obsession, they're sometimes an invitation to individualism and narcissism, both already well reinforced by our economic models and our cultural preoccupations. In my view, we need to find a base to do leadership with less ego, not more. So the identity work that I'm advocating here is not about polishing the image, finetuning the genuine gestures or throes in a well chosen childhood anecdote, as, indeed, perhaps I've done myself; it is about asking some deep and searching questions of who or what our leadership is for.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Thank you. A quick anecdote: I realised I was asked to give some advice to a younger person who was part of the news and current affairs team at the ABC, a very impressive younger woman, and she was temporarily stuck, and she said, "Well, you know, I don't know where to go." And she'd had a baby and she didn't feel she was getting back in properly. And I said, "Well, you've got a whole lot of ideas," and nominated her ideas, articulated them out loud, and I said, "Do those. Work those up into a proposition and take them to another program." I suggested she go to Radio National to do a background briefing. And she looked at me, and it just stunned me.

She said, "But will the people in news and current affairs listen to that? Will they approve?" And it was just this moment. I had forgotten because I came through exactly that same route – I had forgotten about seeking approval from those boys whom I started with. I'd absolutely forgotten that I was so obsessed with that when I was a younger woman. I looked at her stunned and I said, "Well, who cares what they think?" And she said, "Oh, but I want them to like what I do." And that was a real paradox, because that comes out of a very strong, good culture that breeds and brings young people on. You know, the radio/current affairs division is sort of the heart and soul of the ABC as far as I'm concerned. It brings people forward, gives them lots and lots of power. They reach out. But it also – there's a point at which you have to throw it off and say, "Well, stuff the lot of them," in my opinion, to become yourself. That is a very big journey. You're nodding your head, Alison. I don't know whether you've seen that happen. I think it's particularly for women, but it may not just be for women.

ALISON WATKINS: I can definitely relate to having been through that, starting out feeling not at all confident about my ability, and particularly when I joined McKinsey. It was very intimidating, and I figured I might survive a year if I was lucky, and that lack of confidence holds you back because you don't take risks and you don't put forward ideas that you might otherwise do, and I see the Gen Yers, who we're going to talk about later, really very good at that. Generally they're very much more assertive. I did actually need to get told and through 360 type processes it was quite illuminating for me to realise, that seeking approval of others was a really important source of validation for me. You resist it and think, "Oh, I'm not like that," but, then, when you think about it you have to face up to it, and then I think you really can move forward.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: And, Don, I think you've been through that whole 360 degree feedback system. Do you think it's good?

DON ARGUS: I think it helps with the self awareness. I came across it at Harvard back in the mid 80s, where we went through the psych testing and there were examples of your lifestyle and what you were doing, and at that stage I came back and I was in the running to be the CEO in the bank, and I had to make a choice whether I really wanted to do it. But it's quite interesting when you get into this self awareness. I tell a funny story about the first time I introduced it to the board, and these Y type individuals – there was actually a push back. They really did not want to get involved with this. And I said, "Well, if we're going to sit here and overview a 360 degree feedback on the senior executives of the company, why aren't we subjecting ourselves to the same thing?" Anyway, the first time up was quite horrendous for some. And then after you go through the thing about three or four times it becomes good, but what comes out of it – you actually have a meaningful discussion about a person's performance, what their expectations are, rather than all of the networking and the other stuff that goes on.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Have you ever seen people really crushed by it?

DON ARGUS: Yes, I have. I've seen executives crushed by it, and then you need external help. My first experience of it was for me to share my development experiences with my peers. That's a real test. And then the peers are feeding back to you when they don't see you making progress on some of your inadequacies.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: We've alluded to Gen Y and X – people born between 1963 and '78 are considered to be Gen X, and then after that Gen Y. I wonder what you take from that. Alan?

ALAN JOYCE: I think we have a group developing in GenY that are very much not interested in the fast progression; they're interested in getting the balance right. And we're finding a lot of people that are saying, "I don't want the promotion. I'm happy within the job I'm doing. I'm not happy to go to that next level. I don't want the extra hassle involved in it. I'm prepared to do what we're doing and spend a bit more time with the family or on other things outside of work."

GERALDINE DOOGUE: And what does that do to you? Do you argue with that?

ALAN JOYCE: It's a little bit of a shock, because you don't expect that. You expect everybody else to be driven and wanting it, and I think that's been a bit of a shock. A lot of my managers and senior managers, who are probably the Generation X category and Baby Boomers, expect people to have the determination and the grit and want them to do it as well as they would, and there has been a little bit of, "God! What's wrong with them? Why are they not interested?"

GERALDINE DOOGUE: They've lost ambition.

ALAN JOYCE: I think that's very true. I think it's taken a while for people to be used to it, and I think we're finding as an organisation that the balance is very important and some people that are very happy doing what they're doing add a lot of value to the organisation. They've got that balance right.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Do you assume people have a lunch hour?

ALAN JOYCE: Some people have a lunch hour?

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Yes. See, I forgot about lunch hours years ago, and I often ask people that. It's a very interesting question.

ALAN JOYCE: We have an airline in Asia, Jetstar Asia, and it's very different between the two organisations, because up in Asia at probably 12 o'clock to 1.30 everybody has gone, and they all literally walk out the door at the same time, whereas within our offices there probably half the office people come and go, for a lot of people do what they need to do, but a lot of people do work through the lunch hour.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: And are you trying to change that Asian culture or do you accept that?

ALAN JOYCE: Well, the Asian culture is a different culture. What I get, and the management here probably got a little bit, upset about, the Asian airline was losing a lot of money, is losing a lot of money, and there isn't that urgency, and, you know, you expect the people to put the effort in to make sure they turn it around, and I think the new management, interestingly enough, is no longer Australian. We've had four chief executives, three of whom have been Australian; the latest is a Singaporian – she is very into the urgency and getting determination. And the work ethic is even stronger than I've seen, and she's trying to change that culture into an urgency and people working and getting things fixed.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Warwick, you've seen another side, haven't you? You still see an incredible drive without any notion of protecting themselves among a lot of the young people coming into the financial industry, don't you?

WARWICK NEGUS: Very much so. You know, I talked about the war for talent earlier. If you're in the finance industry, at the moment, by definition, everybody is growing. We all have increasing needs for people. And, you know, I think it's a much more formalised process on campus these days to recruit the good people. They have plenty of choice, and the best recruits these days have usually got as many as five offers from the McKinseys or from the investment banks or from the broking companies or fund managers. You do have to go a step beyond in highlighting the sort of career people can have, and they're driven. They are driven.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: You will still see people effectively sleeping under their desks and overnight the company brings in lots of food. There's just an assumption you'll work through whatever it takes.

WARWICK NEGUS: Even at the Commonwealth Bank, I think and that concerns me. I mean, I know that we were doing something in a team, that we needed to get something done, and the team worked from Monday and they went home on Tuesday night, and that does concern me. The product of that effort was absolutely outstanding. They were results oriented and they didn't go until they achieved the result. And so they added enormous value and had a very long lunch that lasted most of Wednesday as a result. But it does concern me because in that group of people that did that, half the team are married with children, and one is a mother as well. So, I think that there was a lot of sacrifice in order to achieve that. It's not sustainable.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: One of the other things I've read about Gen Y is that they need to feel wanted. And you talk about this business of belonging, Don. Warwick, you actually think that formal mentor mentee schemes slightly miss the mark and a good chat at a football game might do the trick.

WARWICK NEGUS: The leader is required these days to have a lot more interaction, face time, with the people around them, and I think that in a large organisation that can go from the board of directors all the way down.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Do you like doing that, honestly?

WARWICK NEGUS: I don't mind. There are only so many hours in the day, and there are 1200 people in my organisation, but I think you've got to pick your mark. I think you can pick the people you think have extraordinary potential, and I think you can make time, you can go to lunch, you can go out at night, you can have a drink, you can do the things that may not mean much to you but mean an enormous amount to the person you're with – giving them that time. And I think that has enormous benefits for the organisation. We weren't doing that in the 80s, or even perhaps in the 90s.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: What about the message you might have for people in their 20s and 30s about what they should do now if they want to aspire to leadership? Amanda, I know you take a perverse view of this, to the extent that you think that maybe even asking that question… you'd want to know why they wanted to aspire to leadership, I sense. But maybe we could just talk about that for a bit.

AMANDA SINCLAIR: Well, I guess I'd like to see a process of thoughtful expansion of the person. So not just looking for the next promotion, but a sense of, "How do I round myself out" and particularly, "How do I respond to areas of weakness? How do I really grow myself?" Those would be some of the things I would be looking for. So not necessarily the predictable trajectory. We were talking a little bit earlier about the difficulty we all have with 360 degree feedback and so on, but what we do know is that it's failure we learn from, you know, it's those disastrous pieces of feedback and it's those events where, you know, we really go down in flames. You know, once we pick ourselves up off the floor and stop blaming everybody else, you know, they're the ones where we really start to say, "Well, what was my role in this and how can I address that?"

GERALDINE DOOGUE: What do you think, Don?

DON ARGUS: Can I put a bit of a hard edge on this? Over my 40 or 50 years in business, I've seen the timeframes of the owners of corporations slip from accepting a three-year payback on the cash that you might be generating to probably now you have people that are ticking your stock over every five seconds. All this is starting to condense, and leaders today – if you aspire to leadership in corporations, you have to be able to spread yourself across the spectrum of your stakeholders as well as your shareholders, and all the timeframes are shorter, and it's very interesting to see behavioural patterns of people once they get driven by that dreadful term "return on equity". Now, as a shareholder I happen to like it, but I suppose as an individual I can see that it's having a big effect on a lot of corporations. I'll quote you an example.

I like working with the Generation Ys. I like to sit down and see what their expectations are. We have geologists in our organisation, and for the first time I've seen diversification working, where you're getting young women coming through with the young men. And I sat down with 10 of these people the other day, and I said, "What's going to happen to your lifestyle when you go out and work out in the field for three weeks at a time, maybe longer?" And they all looked at me as if I came from another planet. They said, "You're going to fly us in and out every week." And I said, "Oh, I see." And I said, "Who controls your budget?" And they said, "Oh, Mr So and So." And I said, "So, he's got room in his budget to fly you in and out every week?" "Oh, yes." I said, "Do you think that's sustainable in the long term?" "Probably not." And I said, "Well, what would you think you would do about that?" "Oh, we'll probably go off and try some other profession at that point." Interesting stuff, as to how people think and the external pressures on people when you start to think about getting your lifestyle balance and then you have to deal with the realities of those stakeholders out there who have different expectations to what you might have.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: I was at a conference recently and they were saying there are 6000 vacancies at the moment in the mining industry in Australia. So they have some leverage over you. Warwick, by the sound of it, you're not seeing anything like that, you're not seeing demands being made on you in the funds management industry?

WARWICK NEGUS: Well, at this stage in the funds management industry, where the stockmarket is up by 30-something per cent in a year, I think expectations do become somewhat unrealistic. And we talked about people having failure during their careers as a wonderful learning exercise. Some of the great cataclysmic stockmarket events have really shaped great investors. I was at Bankers Trust for October '87 and I saw a lot of colleagues lose their shirts and I saw a lot of car orders cancelled and people saying, "Jeez, I'll never do that again," and people learning wonderful disciplines as a result of that. I think we've seen it a number of times since then – the dotcom boom. For a moment in time there were so many wonderful investors who lost the lot and people learned a tremendous amount.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: That business of reinventing yourself is also very, very interesting, isn't it, in terms of people coming back from those sorts of setbacks? Or even making the transition from CEO to chairman. Don, you talk about the business of finding new forms of leadership style. I think this is much under-discussed. What's that like? You can't pull the same levers, can you?

DON ARGUS: No, you can't, but you are reinventing yourself every time you have a change of job, and there are different pressures, different behaviours you have to undertake. I had a reputation in the bank of if you got out of your chair I'd probably be sitting in there helping you do the job. When you become a chairman you've got to sit on your hands; you do have to think about some of the side issues that you don't control. It's a big transition.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: There's a great quote from Paul Keating, "Every now and then you have to flick the switch to vaudeville." think that is really true of leadership. That's what I've observed in the media, where there is a lot of ego, and the ego, when it's managed and harnessed well, is put to the service of creativity, and there's chutzpah required. It's a joy to see, if it's done well. We've been a bit sober tonight. I mean, what about showmanship? Alan?

ALAN JOYCE: It's a point but I think we've all seen it go off the rails at the same time, and it's not been a pretty sight. Mr Branson is probably an example of that. I think there's probably an element of it, and sometimes it's done for effect, it gets a lot of publicity. We were just talking about Mr Branson's example of people flying into space. I doubt it will ever happen – maybe it will – but it's a great news story, it's great vaudeville, it's a great song and dance. It generates what he wants to generate, and I think people do it for different reasons. But I'm not sure all the time in the best organisations that it necessarily works. It generates free marketing, good publicity, good image, but I'm not sure it's the right thing in terms of core leadership.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Well, it's certainly not the word of the moment, but it's the great hallmark of the entrepreneur, and often they produce it and they've got the capacity to cope with it. The people around them have to pick up the pieces. Amanda, what do you think about the issue?

AMANDA SINCLAIR: I think leadership is performance, and I think that there's often quite a lot of physicality; that's part of a compelling leadership performance. I agree with Alan that it can go both ways, but I think we have ignored those dimensions of leadership in the study of leadership. So I'm very interested in how baddies play into leadership, and how that can be very much part of what a leader is about. It also shades into our concern for the whole person. When we're talking leadership, we're not just talking about the cognitive; we're talking about the heart, you know, the energy. And the power, the physical around that. As leaders we are probably interested in the ways those things can play in a positive direction as well as in the risks.

Venue

Melbourne